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Whither the revered scientist?

After two days of provocative ideas and spirited exchanges at an international gathering recently in Toronto, British museum curator Robert Bud neatly summed up the collective wisdom.

By Peter CalamaiScience Writer

Sun., Nov. 4, 2007

After two days of provocative ideas and spirited exchanges at an international gathering recently in Toronto, British museum curator Robert Bud neatly summed up the collective wisdom.

"The scientists are terrified."

This widespread angst among scientists has been sparked by evidence that the traditional social compact between science and the public has been irrevocably sundered. Put bluntly, much of the public no longer implicitly trusts either scientists or their pronouncements about everything from climate change to the safety of children's vaccines.

And that matters, not just because of the call on taxpayers to fund increasingly costly research, but also because the impact of science and technology on our lives seems to mount by the minute.

"It is difficult to think of anything we do in public life that doesn't pass through the window of science and technology," observed Sheila Jasanoff, a professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government who delivered one of two evening public lectures at the CBC's Glenn Gould Studio.

Yet judging from the tenor of the meeting, restoring some measure of the lost trust will require scientists to rethink the basic tenets of their calling and to fundamentally renegotiate their relationships with the public.

The public, too, will need to accept a more active role, examining critically issues such as who benefits from advances in science and technology, who owns the intellectual property, and how it will be applied.

"Being better informed is not enough, the public must also be empowered," said Peter Broks, author of Understanding Popular Science.

Public unease and outright mistrust concerning science has repeatedly cropped up in opinion polling in recent years::

Almost one in four of 1,000 adults surveyed for the British Royal Society in 2002 didn't trust scientists in general to tell the truth.

A 2004 survey of 2,000 adult Canadians for federal science departments found almost 30 per cent expressing concern that science is "going too far and is hurting society rather than helping it."

The largest ever survey of public values and attitudes toward science and technology involved face-to-face interviews in 2005 with almost 33,000 adults in 32 European countries. Four in five said that the authorities should formally oblige scientists to respect ethical standards, a result widely interpreted as indicating a lack of trust in scientists to police themselves.

Reasons put forward for this unease are many and varied, including the blurring of the lines between science, business and government, the increasing complexity of questions that science is called upon to answer and a general societal mistrust of institutions.

As further evidence of how seriously this angst is being taken, the Toronto meeting came on the heels of publication of a seven-point ethics code for research scientists portrayed as the counterpart of the Hippocratic Oath for physicians.

This new code already binds all government scientists in Britain, where it was developed, and is being promoted worldwide by Sir David King, the U.K. government chief scientific advisor.

"We want to get the idea across to the public that scientists can be trusted," King told an interviewer, "if they live by the code."

It's unlikely to be that simple, judging by the September "Trust in Science" workshop here, which drew more than 60 participants from Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. The driving force behind it was something called the Cluster for the Humanistic and Social Studies of Science, just launched with $2 million in federal funding.

The participants were overwhelmingly academics from the humanities and social sciences who examine the history, philosophy and impact of technology, as opposed to researchers from the natural sciences, medicine and life sciences. Indeed, knowledge among the participants about those other sciences was highly variable.

In their own fields, however, the participants have carried out pioneering work into public trust in science, with case studies covering such widely varied topics as Toronto's SARS outbreak and the deadly levee breach in New Orleans.

A repeated theme among workshop participants was that many scientists still act as if they possess the "facts," while the public merely has "opinions."

In reality, however, scientists are increasingly expressing opinions, and laypersons sometimes possess greater expertise than the scientists, especially in the case of rare medical afflictions.

Philip Mirowski of the University of Notre Dame laid a large part of the blame for a loss of public trust in science on three factors. First, the withdrawal of governments from even attempting to manage science, thus ceding priorities to the whims of the marketplace; second, outsourcing of research and development by corporations, meaning the demise of anything that could be called national science strengths; and third, the transformation of scientific research into a "fungible" commodity, so it is essentially interchangeable.

"If you buy your science and I buy my science, then how can it act as an arbiter of anything?" Mirowski asked.

Trust in science also suffers when scientists can't come up with definitive answers quickly enough to respond to public concerns, as illustrated by analysis of the 2003 SARS outbreak in Toronto and the continuing controversy over vaccination and autism in children.

Alan Richardson, a philosophy professor at the University of British Columbia, reached his conclusions after studying reports from the two major SARS inquiries. He noted unfounded advice from experts for the public to stay away from Chinatown.

"All decisions were decisions under ignorance, because there was no reliable data during the outbreak," he said. "It didn't exist."

But the greatest damage may have been inflicted by the observation in the reports from both Dr. Andrew Naylor and Ontario Justice Archie Campbell: that the public health system failed in the SARS outbreak

"The public health system can only work in a structure of public trust," Richardson said. "Saying it failed probably means that public compliance will be harder to achieve in any future outbreak."

Jennifer Keelan, a University of Toronto professor of public health sciences, has been studying the clash between scientists and activists who blame their children's autism on low levels of mercury preservative used to avoid contamination in multi-dose vaccines.

"Mistrust is an understatement to describe the level of vitriol in the debate," she said.

In effect, a scientific stalemate exists. Some research is said to show an "association" between the mercury preservative and autism in lab animals. Yet epidemiologists don't have large enough population surveys to rule out such long-shot adverse reactions.

Keelan said the activists aren't anti-science, like many anti-vaccination groups. Nor do they promote "junk" science. They simply want the scientists to investigate different avenues.

"Will the outputs of science be markedly different if the opportunity exists for citizens to pose questions?" asked Keelan.

Scientists might ask themselves about the erosion of the traditional trust relationships among researchers, who once readily exchanged things like specialized strains of mice or reagents, custom chemicals used in experiments.

Increasingly such exchanges are now circumscribed by material transfer agreements, complex legal documents that spell out details like liability and indemnification, due diligence and standards for care. Some even feature "reach-through" clauses, guaranteeing the supplier of the materials a share in any subsequent commercialization because of subsequent research done elsewhere.

Use of these agreements is exploding. In 1998, the University of Toronto handled about 30. This year, +*officials have reviewed 170.

Similar growth at U.S. universities prompted this wry workshop comment from Notre Dame's Mirowski:

"Why should the public trust science when it is becoming apparent that scientists less and less trust each other?"

Star science writer Peter Calamai, based in Ottawa, was a panellist at the Trust in Science workshop, which paid his travel expenses to attend.

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